GAYLORD

Music writers are a worthless lot. Useless wankers who ruminate, extrapolate, exaggerate, and placate; know-it-alls whose only challenge is in searching for metaphors and similes like Louis Leakey searched for Zinjanthropus (speaking of which, there's one).

And when bands like Gaylord come Advertisementalong the salivation starts Niagara Fallin' (and there's another...).

I've been one of these degenerates for six years now, and despite my participation in this lowly trade of opinion-driven rhetoric, I've never used other bands in hypothetical situations as adjectives to describe another band.

But with an utterly cool yet absolutely indefinable band like this Rochester trio, I sometimes find myself hitting a wall. So since I've never done it before, just this once I'm gonna slum and give it a go.

OK:

-Gaylord is like Jimi Hendrix in a zoot suit running an OTB that serves kosher pork to left-handed drag queens.

-Gaylord is Living Color locked in the trunk of a rusted-out Buick Riviera with cheater slicks and Jello Biafra at the wheel.

-Gaylord is...somebody shoot me.

But seriously, Gaylord is an amazing band, and you don't need to be a music critic to figure that out. The band is fun, funky, irreverent, and moves seamlessly between genres.

Drummer Drew Verstraete blames Gaylord's eccentricity on the band members' diverse musical palates.

"It's just the backgrounds we came from," he says. "It's not really intentional. We've all grown up around obscure music; prog-rock, stuff like that. It's all what interests us."

Gaylord has been around for roughly 10 years. It chewed up five drummers a la Spinal Tap before ex-Big Hair and current Low Ton-er Verstraete signed on seven years ago. Jeff Steverson (bass) and Core Atoms (guitar) play and think a little left of convention.

"I think it's either you get Core and Jeff, or you don't," says Verstraete. "I think as a band you really have to understand how these two play together."

Verstraete's time in the maniacal Big Hair helped.

"You know, those guys were some strange individuals," he says.

In Gaylord's case it isn't so much strangeness as it is the glorious result of unnatural pairings; a marriage of styles that would leave other bands sounding cluttered and confused.

Gaylord introduces a lot of sounds, angles, tones, and moods in the course of a tune. Atoms loves his wah-wah; Steverson is half-funk, half-thunder; and Verstraete is exact and rhythmically murderous. And you can hear it all in the course of just one song. Granted, these tunes are a little longer than your standard rock fare, some clocking in at almost 10 minutes. At a recent Gaylord show at The Bug Jar the band cranked out only three --- four at the most --- tunes in the span of a 30-minute set.

More than a song, each piece is practically an abstract aria or classical movement. Gaylord is tight enough to convince you this isn't a free-form jam, yet coy enough to leave you wondering just a little.

"Sometimes I don't even get it," Verstraete says.

The band is beginning to street test new tunes for an album tentatively titled Lonestar vs Ishtar, which should hit in the spring. The five-song demo the band is circulating goes from a whisper to a scream with fierce precision one minute and languid lucidity the next. The lone cover, The Doors' "Light My Fire," gets burned with whirling intensity and hysterical syncopation that makes the original version sound vanilla in retrospect.

"There is a basis to our songs," says Verstraete. "We actually have a song structure. It's hard to find, but it's there. And everyone has their contribution to it. And it just seems to work."

Gaylord will prove it in March when the band hits the road for a 12-city tour centered around the anti-industry, anti-South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, appropriately titled Fuck By Fuck You.

A lot of bands, big and small, have attempted this loose-tight tossed salad of multiple styles. Despite considerable talent, most fail or come off as arrogant.

That's not to say Gaylord ain't proud.

"It just seems to work," Verstraete says. "We're just kinda fortunate. Bands are doing what we're doing, but nothing is Gaylord. You'll never see a band and say ‘That was just like Gaylord.'" - Frank DeBlase

October 4th Erie Times:


"Need relief from sore muscles? Try Bengay. Need that muscular music that offers relief from pop pablum?
Try Gaylord, an exciting and free wheeling trio from Rochester, NY that plays with Patton-like freedom, as in Mike, and outer-space like sense of adventure, as in Zappa.
Rather than lock themselves into a stiff musical box, the three players in Gaylord embrace a dizzying array of influences...

-Dave Richards
Eire Times
(read the rest on: GOerie.com) - Erie Times 10/4/07

If the name of the game is charm, then Rochester’s Gaylord win.

Not only have they chosen a word that I haven’t heard since third
grade for a band name—unless you count in Meet The Parents, which I don’t—but their
music also has a unique quirkiness to match.

Touching on punk, metal, jazz, funk and surf rock stylistically, it might just be what Mr.Bungle might have been if they’d had a little soul.

Propelled by the guitars of Core Atoms and the ferocious jazz drumming of Andrew Verstraete, not to mention the bass/vocal work
of Jeff Steverson, the trio are a three-man mobile party unit, the kind of act you’d see rocking out in PCU if it were made today and
George Clinton couldn’t do it for whatever reason.

Those who shoot over to their MySpace will be treated to an exceptional, siren-laced jam
cover of The Doors’“Light My Fire,” the first such cover I’ve heard to give the song the
treatment it truly deserves.

They’ve got tour dates lined up through March, including dates
at South By Southwest in Austin, TX, but so far nothing in our area.

To tide yourself over, you can head to cdbaby.com and pick up the
latest record, Tsunami. Consider it highly recommended. - The Aquarian

October 11, 2007



Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic

After 10 years of what Drew Verstraete calls "running into a lot of brick walls and pushing them over," Gaylord can see the light in the distance: It looks like Atlanta.

Perhaps Resplendent Locution gets them there. Gaylord celebrates the release of its third album Saturday at the Bug Jar. It continues Gaylord's impressive upward arc, from a joke band (First album: 2001's Drop a Bomb on a Town of Fried Baloney) to a band that plays something different, and plays it well.

It is punk, thrash metal, prog rock and funk, connected by Verstraete's machine-gun, jazz-fusion drumming. It's politics, too. Resplendent Locution opens with the manic instrumental "Lovestar vs." leading to the Eastern-tinged "Ishtar," with Core Atoms' lyrics of "a Cowboy-clown crowns himself king." Put those songs together and you have George Bush invading Iraq.

Along the way, the band touches on Spaghetti-Western surf, the Doors' "Light My Fire," bleating sheep and cabaret vocals that sound like Sun Ra of the new millennium.

It may be the 21st century, but not everyone's arrived. "People who wouldn't admire two brown guys and a white guy playing in a band called Gaylord," Verstraete says, conceding that the band's name "keeps those people who we don't want in our shows, out of our shows.

"We definitely have been in places and been at shows where, before we play, there's been skepticism and some kind of words. ... Then the music kind of shuts people up."

There are comparisons to Lethargy, a Rochester outfit of the mid-'90s with a similar taste for fusions of rock, jazz and humor. Key members of that group moved to Atlanta to form the highly regarded metal band Mastodon. Now they've invited Gaylord to join them next year.

It would be a radical move, but Gaylord is radical. Its MySpace site offers a laundry list of influences: anyone who's been a bee under the saddle of horses swimming the mainstream. Noam Chomsky, Dick Gregory, Ward Churchill. And most appropriately, the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, who famously wrote, "The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so." - Democrat & Chronicle

When people talk about the music of dreams, they're usually talking about what they wish dreams sounded like --- all light and airy and full of butterflies. The reality is dreams sound like Gaylord: manic, weird, pleasant, funny, making little or lots of sense simultaneously. Simply put, these guys are plugged in to what's what and are pure genius.

--- Frank De Blase
- City-NEWS.COM

(March 31, 2006)

Core Atoms (pronounced "Corey Adams"), guitarist and singer for local eclectic rock trio Gaylord, says there's little chance audience members will get bologna thrown at them at the band's gig on Friday, April 7, at Monty's Krown.

Not anymore.

Although that practice was once a staple of the band's live shows, the 31-year-old Rochesterian says there are two reasons it's gone:

1) "It just gets messy."

2) "I used to work at a deli, so I was able to smuggle meat out. And I don't anymore."

So what's thrown now?

"Panties," he laughs.

One might assume a band that releases an album called Drop a Bomb on a Town of Fried Bologna, (hence the flying lunchmeat) or calls itself Gaylord is less than serious. But all along that's been the plan of Atoms, bassist Jeff Steverson, 31, and drummer Andrew Verstraete, 33, both also of Rochester, who have made up Gaylord since 1999.

According to Atoms (who played with Steverson and several different drummers as Gaylord during the three or four years prior to that), the band name was chosen to immediately weed out "absolutely closed-minded people." The dark humor in song titles and lyrics veils politically charged messages underneath.

"You never wanna beat someone over the head with politics," Atoms says.

So instead, fans are beaten ever so lovingly with a nearly unclassifiable brand of progressive rock/surf guitar/metal/jazz fusion/reggae.

"Core brings a lot of '70s Motown influence, I have a lot of the progressive rock and Beethoven classical stuff, and Andrew has a lot of metal and jazz influence," Steverson says.

Atoms calls this amalgam, which can be heard on the trio's latest album Tsunami "neo-classical."

The varied sound brings out varied fans.

"I can look into the crowd and see people who are all over the place in musical genres," Atoms says.

While the band takes pride in its lyrical humor and onstage banter, Atoms admits that recent world events have matured the members slightly.

"You've got two wars in the past four years and natural disasters all over the place," he says. "You can't help but have it mature you."

But that doesn't mean changes that are too drastic for the band.

"After all," says Atoms. "We did end our last album with the sound of a fart."

-Tim Karan - Insider Magazine

More quality music recently came our way via Rochester trio, Gaylord, and their new disc, Tsunami. The ever-tight threesome lend their vast instrumental talents to six tunes that play the field of jazz fusion, progressive, metal and funk. They are at their best with songs that tear into sudden frenzy, reaching manic heights. The band will celebrate the release of their fourth album with a show at the Bug Jar on Thursday, December 29 . . .

---Michelle Picardo - Freetime Magazine

Apparently Les Claypool from Primus once found a way to impregnate Larry, Curly, and Moe using a Crybaby distortion pedal. The goofy prodigies resulting from that disturbing dalliance now make up Gaylord, whose latest CD, Tsunami, will soon be unleashed onto an unsuspecting public. Guitarist Core Atoms, bassist Jeff Steverson, and drummer Drew Verstraete take riffs and fills traditionally associated with jazz and somehow make urgent and funky rock out of them. Alchemy, I believe its called.
Gaylords December 29th CD release show features guests Skull and Eddie Nebula and the Plague, as well as onstage banter that might make beer dribble from your nose.

---Dayna Papaleo - City-News

Tsunami

Jeffcore Records

Gaylord founders Jeff Steverson and Core Atoms managed to invent their own musical language while still wearing influences like Big Hair, Primus, Mr. Bungle, and Rush on their sleeve. Their work, a raucous blend of prog, metal, and funk with heavy traces of classical, continues to elicit a fanatic response from audiences nearly 10 years into Gaylord's history.

Recorded shortly after a three-year hiatus, this EP sees the local trio continuing to work with the trademark structural complexity --- something it seemed they had taken as far as possible before disbanding. Here, however, the band wisely tempers its approach by introducing some repetition. While much of the material shifts in style and tempo almost compulsively (as usual), many of the songs gravitate around and return to central motifs, which suggests that the band isn't simply stitching together parts and quite possibly stands at the cusp of a grand new vision that's more cohesive than anything it has offered to date.

--- Saby Reyes-Kulkarni - City Magazine

Gaylord is another group of musicians that leaves room for listeners to fill in the blanks. Despite its swerving score, Gaylord's music is just plain fun. The band headlined a Montage Live triple bill Saturday night with TADUYA and The Quitters, and I can't recommend them enough. - I Scene it